A Family’s Hard Journey, With Disney as a Guide

By Judith Warner

May 21, 2014

Over the last two decades, Ron Suskind has been known as a hard-hitting, Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter, a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, a chronicler of the Obama White House. In private, though, Mr. Suskind was Iago the parrot, Baloo the bear, Merlin the wizard: Disney characters whose dialogue, songs and even “wisdom” he borrowed to communicate with his autistic son, Owen.

In “Life, Animated,” Mr. Suskind relates Owen’s transformation from a seemingly typical infant and toddler to a child who, just before his third birthday, became “unglued” and retreated behind a seemingly unbreakable wall of silence. He then charts Owen’s remarkable journey back to connection through the unlikely vehicle of the Disney cartoons that are his only passion.

This return trip starts in a single remarkable moment. At 6 ½, after years without age-appropriate speech, Owen observes his older brother, Walt, having a mild meltdown at the end of his ninth birthday party.

“ ‘Walter doesn’t want to grow up,’ he says evenly, ‘like Mowgli or Peter Pan,’ ” Mr. Suskind recalls. It is Owen’s first complex sentence, and he says it looking straight at his parents. Later that day, Mr. Suskind picks up a puppet of Iago, the parrot sidekick in Disney’s animated “Aladdin.”

“So, Owen, how ya’ doin’?” he asks in Iago’s voice. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?”

“I’m not happy,” Owen answers. “I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.”

A whole new world begins.

Mr. Suskind; his wife, Cornelia; and Walt start spending long hours with Owen, reciting Disney dialogue to draw him out. Success is elusive. For a long time, there is no return to the complex, interpretive speech of the party day. Owen does little more than repeat movie lines — a parroting of speech that some of his doctors and teachers dismiss as mere echolalia, a typical autistic behavior. Some specialists try to dissuade the Disney watching, arguing that it feeds Owen’s rigidity and withdrawal. But others use the Disney material to devise teaching and therapy strategies tailored to Owen’s obsession.

The results are extraordinary: Helped by Disney credits, Owen learns to read. He hones his writing skills by reworking classic Disney scripts. Talking through the voices of wise or protective Disney sidekicks like Rafiki, a supporting mandrill-like monkey from “The Lion King,” he feels his way through stories set up by his therapist to cover territory like “being lost or confused, being tricked, being frustrated, or losing a friend.”

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Ron SuskindCreditMarissa Rauch

The costs are huge: $90,000 a year, Mr. Suskind estimates, plus the hours and effort expended by Cornelia, who runs “Team Owen,” the stable of professionals who guide them. She tries to help him make friends, with limited success, and even home-schools him for a time.

Mr. Suskind often displays virtuosity in capturing the intimate realities of life in a household dominated by autism, where the disorder shapes the life of every family member. Walt has turned himself into “a junior adult at 7,” his typically developing strengths celebrated as almost magical, heroic powers. Taking care of Owen gives his parents “wholeness and a sense of worth,” rewards that sometimes fuel a bizarre competition between them that Mr. Suskind calls the Sacrifice Games. “No prize money attached,” he writes. “But the deification points are redeemable for periodic gifts and regular trips to the moral high ground.”

Mr. Suskind’s honesty is striking and deeply admirable. He is careful to respect his family’s dignity, but can be merciless when it comes to self-revelation, particularly when laying out the contours of his double life: the contrast between his professional standing as a member of Washington’s journalistic elite and his personal status as the father of a child, whom he himself, as a child, would have dismissed as “damaged goods.”

His prestige helps. Mr. Suskind knowingly describes landing a spot for Owen in the city’s most sought-after preschool, which admits a few special-needs kids every year. In this crowd, a Pulitzer parent is an “indispensable addition.” A lifelong overachiever, Mr. Suskind is forced to learn, the hard way, that having an autistic child upends “our surety in the ways we measure human value and some of us see ourselves, quite comfortably, as better than others.” There’s no question that he is ennobled by the experience.

Memoirs about struggle with brain-based disorders have a tendency to be overburdened with the very attributes of those disorders: Accounts of anxiety often have a nerve-rattling edge; depression memoirs can threaten to engulf the reader. Autism, characterized by obsessive, inward-turned interests and, in Owen’s case, an ability to watch the same movie hundreds of times, is similarly problematic.

That accounts for the one problem in this otherwise stellar book. Though it is essential, no doubt, for Mr. Suskind to explain how everyone made creative use of Disney material, there is only so much of Jafar and Iago, Merlin and Arthur that a neurotypical reader can cheerfully tolerate.

Mr. Suskind’s fealty to reality has another cost: We are denied the storybook ending we might expect from a Disney-infused tale. Owen makes great progress. He graduates from high school, leaves home to attend a collegelike program on Cape Cod, finds a girlfriend, even travels to California to meet with a top Disney producer. But he does not achieve his dream of becoming a Disney animator and, in his own words, “usher in a new golden age of hand-drawn animation.”

His time away at school doesn’t correspond to what we think of as the college experience; nor is his romance likely to lead where a parent might hope. (Ron and Cornelia, in one of the book’s most painful passages, attend an event at Owen’s “college” where parents tell of having recently had their romantically attached adult children sterilized.) We see that, despite Owen’s progress, he may never make it entirely on his own. In real life, unlike in Disney, only some dreams can come true.

LIFE, ANIMATED

A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism

By Ron Suskind

Illustrated. 358 pages. Kingswell. $26.99.

Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Family’s Hard Journey, With Disney as a Guide. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe